Digital transformation is changing the way many MSPs support their clients. The MSP market was practically built on server monitoring. Now that businesses are using cloud services for their infrastructure, small business servers are becoming a rare commodity. Similar pressures are unfolding in the midmarket and enterprise sectors.
This transition is squeezing some traditional services MSPs offer, including server monitoring. But the shift to cloud services also creates a lack of control and knowledge about the status and potential issues of a company's new infrastructure. With such a distributed environment it can be difficult to obtain a broad understanding of the health of the systems as a whole.
That's where so-called serverless computing and associated monitoring may enter the picture. Yes serverless computing still requires underlying cloud servers. The term "serverless" refers to the fact that the cloud provider dynamically manages machine resources -- the management of capacity planning decisions are hidden from the developer or operator. And serverless architectures may also blend many managed elements, including databases, storage and third-party SaaS-based APIs. That makes it difficult to monitor the overall serverless system.
Serverless monitoring startup Epsagon wants to address that challenge. The startup just secured $4.1 million in seed funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners, StageOne Ventures and Ariel Maislos led the round, which will fuel R&D efforts as well as build out Epsagon's marketing and sales units.
Nitzan Shapira, Co-Founder and CEO of Epsagon said in a prepared statement:
"For serverless architecture, the name of the game today is all about understanding what is going on inside your system in a manner which not only gives you the ability to easily troubleshoot when needed, but that can predict problems you don't even know exist yet."
Through Epsagon's AI-powered performance monitoring platform for serverless architectures, issues can be predicted before they occur, the company claims, which can help businesses eliminate downtime. The platform can also help customers understand how different events on different platforms can be connected causing problems for the entire system. With this visibility into the whole infrastructure, you can quickly troubleshoot and eliminate the problems, Epsagon asserts.
If MSPs can figure out how to offer the same type of monitoring for these more distributed environments, perhaps by leveraging a platform like Epsagon offers, they may ultimately blend their established RMM (remote monitoring and management) tools with new options.
We're also watching to see how Epsagon and serverless monitoring tools potentially compete with cloud monitoring options like New Relic and Datadog, both of which offer infrastructure and APM (application performance monitoring).
